“My Name is Khan is a flawless work” – Subhash K Jha

He repairs almost anything, including irreparably damaged relationships. But this film about damaged lives needs no repairing. My Name Is Khan is a flawless work, as perfect in content, tone and treatment as any film can get. The ‘message’ of humanism doesn’t comes across in long pedantic speeches.

The film’s longest monologue has our damaged but exceptionally coherent hero Rizwan telling a congregation of Black American church-goers about his dead son.

And if that moment moves us to tears it’s because the emotions are neither manipulative nor flamboyant. It isn’t because Rizwan’s son Sameer perished in a racial attack. It isn’t even because Shah Rukh Khan delivers his life’s best performance in that moment of reckoning. Rizwan’s heartfelt rhetorics are not about changing the world with words. Born with a physical disability this is a man on the move. And boy, does he move!

In what is possibly the most touching testament on film to the spirit of world peace and humanism (lofty ideals to achieve in the massy-masala format but see how pitch-perfect Johar gets it), Rizwan takes off on a picaresque journey to meet the US President with a message that initially strikes us as being too na